Well, our Food Stamp Challenge is officially over today. It wasn’t a pure challenge with Bumbershoot this weekend, so we’re going to have to try it again at some point. I enjoyed the conversations that came out of it though, with my mom, friends, Scott.
Apparently “12 percent of Americans — 35 million people — could not put food on the table at least part of last year”. I love that our government is haggling over how to describe “hunger” versus doing anything about it.
A bunch of Congress people are doing the Food Stamp Challenge to raise awareness of the inadequacy of the food stamp program and build support for fixing it. They blog about it here. It sounded like Congresswomen Lee pretty much just skipped meals to get through it. I’d guess this wasn’t much of a change from her regular eating schedule.
(We also joked that these people have aids who probably did months of research to set up their menu for the week. I wish we had an aid to put ours together… next time we’re recruiting Carina!)
In the mean time, local organization are picking up the slack. Northwest Harvest is the biggie here in Washington… they supply food banks around the entire state, have their own food bank in Seattle, and run a program that gets food to kids who need it in Seattle schools.
I feel like I should do something other than preach about this, so I’m going to look into volunteering for my company’s Northwest Harvest food drive. (I’m guessing it’s during the holiday months.) I also want to take our savings from this week and make a donation.
